In a recent interview with SEO and Credo founder John Doherty on Dan Shure’s excellent Experts on the Wire podcast, he mentioned the positive response he’d gotten to a post he’d done this summer on the SEO Tools he uses. He mentioned that it seemed like a pretty simple post idea, but it made sense to me that it would get traction, because John is a smart writer and marketer. As I listened, I was curious what tools he was using, and I took a look at the post. I’ve also taken a page from his playbook in the following column.
I like comprehensive lists of things as much as the next guy, but in a space where tools and software are relatively fragmented, and the applications for those tools change rapidly, it’s especially helpful when experienced practitioners give you a peek at different tools they pay for, what they use them for and how they think about those tools. My consulting company pays for and uses a variety of SEO tools (possibly a few too many, and likely some of the wrong ones — let me know if you have a better approach!), so I thought putting together a similar post would be helpful.
Generally speaking, I tend to err on the side of having access to a tool if we’re likely to get any significant value from it. My business partner Ken and I own and operate both a consulting company and a web publishing company. A tool will probably pay for itself if it costs $50 to $100 a month, and it can:
save ~10 hours of work we’d need to do manually over the course of a year
or unearth a handful of valuable insights a year.
The test for more expensive options is similar, but, of course, the higher the price, the more it should be delivering in time savings and/or insights. Obviously, the tools you’ll use will depend a lot on the problems you’re trying to solve, the size of the sites you’re working on and so on, so your mileage may vary.
OK, on to the tools!
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